Re: All-female shuttle crew-a Dan Goldin stunt or was it a serious idea?

In article <9e378$4673f2a0$4366619c$5182@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mike flugennock <flvg3nn0zk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I know I'm taking a big PC risk here, but I think at least at this point
-- still -- flying an all-female crew would still be more or less a
stunt...

Kinda sorta. Certainly it would have to be deliberately set up -- it
wouldn't happen by accident -- but it could be done as otherwise a
perfectly normal flight with a full workload. It wouldn't be a stunt
in the sense of having no value except publicity.

it'd be a long time before we'd have enough woman pilots and MSs in the
program to give us the statistical possibility of an all-female crew
based purely on merit and experience.

Do bear in mind that the crew-selection process is notoriously arbitrary,
with merit and experience apparently only minor considerations. The
long-standing policy of the Astronaut Office is that any astronaut is
qualified for any flight, although some may be better choices than others
for some flights.

Besides, wasn't the Teacher In Space flight pretty much a stunt, as well
(just not the kind we actually got)? Inspiring it may have been to all
those kids who wanted to be astronauts or scientists when they grew up,
still...

The basic idea behind Citizens In Space was a reasonable one, for a
publicly-funded space program: to fly people who would be better than
the astronauts (a notoriously inarticulate bunch) at communicating the
experience of spaceflight to the public. It wasn't just a teacher; there
were plans to fly journalists and artists as well. (In fact, putting a
teacher first was Reagan's idea, not NASA's.)

JSC in general and the Astronaut Office in particular never liked the idea
much, and the Challenger accident was the perfect excuse to kill it. In
theory, Citizens In Space was just put on hold after Challenger, but it
was abundantly clear that the "hold" was going to be permanent.

The one last snag was Barbara Morgan -- Christa McAuliffe's backup -- who
kept embarrassing NASA by reminding them that she was ready when they
were. That got solved back in 1998 by finding an excuse to admit her to
astronaut training. That announcement was the final obituary for Citizens
In Space. Henceforth NASA would fly government astronauts only; no
ordinary citizens need apply. Well, unless they were ex-astronaut
senators who'd done the President a major political favor...
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